Jennette McCurdy doesn’t understand society’s fascination with child stardom. After all, for the entirety of her teenage years (and into her early 20s), McCurdy was the darling of Nickelodeon, playing the sardonic Sam Puckett on the beloved teen sitcom iCarly and its short-lived spinoff Sam & Cat.
But as she writes in her harrowing new memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, McCurdy’s happy-go-lucky, onscreen persona masked the trauma that she suffered at the hands of her mother, Debra, who physically and emotionally abused her, controlled virtually every aspect of her life, and forced her into a line of work that left her feeling unfulfilled and embarrassed from an early age. After undergoing six years of therapy to unpack the impact that her late mother has had on her life, McCurdy, now 30, is ready to tell her story on her own terms.
“I feel like it’s an uncomfortable thing to say, ‘I'm glad my mom died,’ but I think it’s an important one,” McCurdy tells Teen Vogue over Zoom, referring to the provocative title that left her grandmother in hysterics but that she believes she has rightfully earned. “I feel strongly that anybody who has experienced abuse from a parental figure will know what I’m talking about.”
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Born and raised in Southern California in a poor, Mormon family, Jennette McCurdy was just six years old when Debra, who had dreamed of becoming an actor herself, projected her own unrealized aspirations onto her only daughter. Within a few years, McCurdy became the main breadwinner for her family, appearing in national commercials and making guest appearances on Mad TV, CSI, Malcolm in the Middle, and Karen Sisco before iCarly — all while under the stringent control of a mother who had a pattern of outbursts when she didn’t get her way.
Debra’s presence in McCurdy’s life was all-consuming: She took her to auditions (even if McCurdy was seriously under the weather); signed her up for intensive acting and dancing classes; insisted on giving her showers until she was 16; and performed routine breast and vaginal exams on McCurdy — ostensibly to check for cancerous lumps — that McCurdy describes as invasive, out-of-body experiences.
In the book, McCurdy recounts the day when she was 11 years old that her mom began helping her restrict calories in an attempt to delay puberty and appear younger to land more jobs, essentially encouraging her to become anorexic. Her favorite foods soon became “sugar-free popsicles, applesauce, and unsweetened ice tea,” she writes, and her dinners often consisted of “iceberg lettuce with dressing spray and ripped-up pieces of low-calorie bologna.”
After her mother died of breast cancer in 2013, McCurdy began to struggle with bulimia and binge-eating, as well as an addiction to alcohol. It wasn’t until McCurdy started going to therapy years later that she was able to understand the extent of her mother’s abuse. But she admits that she was reluctant to take her off a self-anointed pedestal, simply because so much of her life — and her identity — had revolved around being a perky people-pleaser and making her mother happy. “My first therapist had suggested that my mom was abusive, and that actual day I quit [going to that therapist],” McCurdy says. “I couldn’t face the idea that my mom wasn’t this beautiful angel that I had made her out to be, and that I think I needed her to be, frankly, as a coping mechanism.”
Having grown up in an environment where her own boundaries were not respected, McCurdy believes that her abusive relationship with her mother played a role in the numerous unhealthy romantic relationships that she had in her first decade of adulthood. In conversation, she speaks with the poise and knowledge of a young woman who has invested countless hours in therapy — at one point during our interview, she explained the concept of attachment theory.
“The idea of attachment theory is that whatever your relationship with your primary caregiver was like as a child, you’ll find partners that kind of reflect that same dynamic. So I needed to be watchful for narcissistic types and just anybody that was in the realm of what my mother was like,” she says, adding that she is now in a loving relationship of her own that does not have those characteristics.
A few years ago, McCurdy turned a number of personal essays about her mother into a one-woman show called I’m Glad My Mom Died and began opening up about their complicated relationship on her podcast, Empty Inside. When the pandemic foiled her plans to take the show on the road, she used the narrative structure of the show as a “jumping-off point” to write a book that dived deeper into her childhood.
Her three older brothers — Marcus, Dustin, and Scottie — have remained “extremely supportive and understanding and empathetic” throughout the writing process, McCurdy says. “I’d be writing and I’d be laughing one second, then I would be crying the next second, just because I’m bringing up so much from the past. And to be able to then call Marcus, Dustin, or Scottie at the end of that and maybe share the memory was really helpful both personally and creatively.”
When her mother died, McCurdy admits that she felt utter “devastation with a little relief,” and then guilt for feeling any kind of relief. But as she began to piece together the true nature of their relationship, “I’d feel devastation, and then I’d feel mad that I felt devastation because I couldn’t believe that this person who abused me still had such power over my emotions and such ability to affect me,” she explains. “I felt like, ‘Why haven’t I outgrown this sadness that I feel towards her? Why is it still so complicated for me?’
“And through writing the book, I've been able to have this — as odd as it sounds — nice experience of grief. It’s been almost 10 years since she died at this point, so it definitely doesn’t hit the same as time goes on. But it’s simple now: I can just miss her and have it be just that. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I miss mom,’ and then I’m able to move on and move forward.’”
McCurdy was 13 when she landed a starring role in iCarly, about a group of high school friends who start a high-energy web show, in which she starred opposite Miranda Cosgrove, Nathan Kress, and Jerry Trainor. The role provided McCurdy with a life-changing amount of visibility and financial stability, but she admits there was always a cruel irony. While McCurdy struggled with food in her personal life, her character frequently indulged in turkey legs, fried chicken and barbecue ribs — so much so that fans would ask her about those foods in person and she would have anxiety about having to eat on camera.
“For me, fame was emotionally stunting,” McCurdy reflects. “I feel like there’s so much inherent angst and uncomfortable growth that’s happening in your adolescent years, and to be famous during that time is like a hat on a hat. It’s too much of all of it, and I think that fame only compounds that angst and makes it more kind of complex and impossible to unpack.”
McCurdy notes that, in the decade since iCarly ended, there has been a noticeable shift in the types of people who approach her on the street now. “[There] used to be a lot of immediate yelling and screaming and touching my arm, and people just didn’t mean anything by it,” she recalls. She wasn’t equipped to handle the attention. But now, “it no longer feels like I’m an object. A girl named Zoe the other day told me that my podcast really helped her to overcome an eating disorder that she no longer has, and those connections mean everything to me. They hit my soul. And I’m so grateful to have that kind of human-to-human connection, because I definitely didn’t feel it for a long time.”
After iCarly, McCurdy, who initially thought she would be getting her own spinoff, discovered she would have to share top billing with then-Victorious star Ariana Grande in Sam & Cat, which was unceremoniously canceled after one season. In retrospect, McCurdy says she completely understands that “Ariana was doing what she had to do” with her burgeoning music career, because she was missing rehearsals and shooting days to sing at various venues. But at the time, McCurdy expressed her frustration privately about not being able to pursue other projects of her own or direct an episode like she had been promised.
“What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’ house. That was the moment I broke,” she writes.
Like any 20-year-old, “I was comparing myself to the people around me, so I was jealous [of Grande]. It was really a time in my life where I was experiencing jealousy and had to learn how to navigate it,” admits McCurdy, who has not spoken to Grande in “a good couple of years” but wishes her the best and hopes “that she is as happy and fulfilled as anybody can be.”
“But now I’m at a place where I wouldn’t trade my life with anybody’s,” she adds. “I’m very proud of the life that I’ve built, and I’ve done it on my terms and I’ve done it with integrity, and it’s so nice to be able to say I’m proud of who I am and where I am. It feels empowering.”
Over the years, McCurdy says she has been approached numerous times to speak about her time at Nickelodeon — and writes in the book that she was supposedly even offered $300,000 as a “parting gift” from the network that she saw as “hush money” — but she didn’t want to say anything publicly until she felt she was ready. She alleges that a figure known as “The Creator” once gave her an unsolicited shoulder massage, ordered her to have her picture taken in a bikini during a wardrobe fitting, and told her to drink an alcohol-spiked coffee when she was 18.
“Honesty is one of my personal values,” McCurdy says about her decision to speak about her former boss, who she describes as both “generous and over-the-top complimentary” and “mean-spirited, controlling and terrifying” in the book. “[It’s] just something that I try to live by in my day-to-day life, and I also try to take that into my writing, and I think it would be a disservice to my own health and healing and to anybody who read the book if I was anything less than transparent.”
When Cosgrove called McCurdy in late 2020 to ask if she would take part in the Paramount+ revival of iCarly, McCurdy politely passed, citing a desire to pursue other projects. Cosgrove, Kress, and Trainor have all spoken out in respect and support of McCurdy’s decision — something that she appreciates — and McCurdy says she has not watched any of the revival nor has she seen it on her social media feeds. “I hope they’re all having fun. I hope they’re all enjoying it,” she says with an earnest smile. (She has no plans to reprise the role and has never watched the original unless she absolutely had to, but she automatically assumed that Sam, who was a juvenile delinquent on the original, is probably in jail somewhere when asked what she thinks might have happened to her character.)
“Throughout my 20s, there were just a lot of changes and shifts that happened, but I was so close with Miranda for a really long time, and we’re not as close as we used to be, but that’s another person that I wish all the best to, because she was really instrumental in my life for a long time,” McCurdy says. “Having that friendship throughout the show and even in the years afterward, to be able to unpack that experience together, was hugely helpful. I love Nathan and Jerry as well, but I was always the closest with Miranda.”
For her next act, McCurdy is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays, which will be similar in tone to I’m Glad My Mom Died but will pick up where the book leaves off in the next stage of her life. And while she decided to retire from acting in 2016, the 30-year-old admits that she has begun to think about a potential return to being in front of the camera, even if her focus remains on writing and directing right now.
“I walked away from acting so definitively back when I was 24, but I recently thought that maybe there’s a way of actually acting again that would be healing and wouldn’t carry with it the baggage that it carried for me before,” McCurdy says. “I don’t know what that means, but I’m open in the future, in some way. It would have to feel right since it did not for me before, but I’m surprised and excited by that openness.”
